War, Peace and Wishful Thinking

In one Seinfeld episode, Elaine Benes, the irrepressibly liberal camp follower, promiscuous skank, and social climber - and small screen progenitor of Sandra Fluke - remarks with reckless abandon and shameless gaucheness to a Leo Tolstoy scholar:

"Although one wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it was, had it been published under its original title, War, What Is It Good For?"

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, is Elaine Benes with arsenic for blood, the air of a bedraggled, whip-wielding dominatrix, and a weight problem that seems to compete with her credibility issues. She does not believe in war. She sees no good in it. War is never "good." Its causes are irrelevant. War means violence, which may spill over into her own life. War is so scary to her and her ilk that there is no justification to discriminate between the combatants, between the good and the bad, between the aggressor and the invaded, between the civilized and the barbaric and homicidal. If any distinction must be made between the parties, it should be weighted in favor of the underdog, in this instance, Hamas, and not Israel.

If Israel didn't exist, all Mideast problems would be solved. That is the thinking. Or not thinking. So, because Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, is "small" and is the aggressor picking on the giant, the world comes down on the side of the bold and ugly midget.

Hamas, the midget, can with impunity and global approval hurl rocks and rockets at the giant, Israel. This is because Hamas knows that the whole world hates Israel because it is a giant, a stubborn, recalcitrant one that refuses to go away and leave the midget to his day in the sun over piles of Jewish bodies. So, Hamas and the Palestinians get a pass. It takes a global village to hate one tiny country that simply won't roll over and play dead for the greater good.

Peace could be secured if Israel would just agree to withdraw to its pre-World War II borders and stop persecuting its marauding persecutors. Then no one need worry about a nuclear bomb-armed Iran. Israel is to blame because Iran cannot tolerate its existence and wants to wipe it out. After all, Iran's beneficent dictator and font of all wisdom, Mahmud Ahmajinadad, claims the Holocaust never really happened, and he wishes to correct that fiction by making it a reality. If Israel were to immolate itself and just let Hamas and Hezbollah and Fatah and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian zombies have their way with her in ways no one wishes to imagine, all would be peaceful and just. The Mideast would settle down and the only troubles one would hear about in that region would be on a par with the banal disputes of Friends.

One almost expects President Barack Obama to offer Hamas military air support. To judge by his behavior, rhetoric and conduct towards Israel since assuming office, the idea is not too fantastical.

John Rawls, in his notorious A Theory of Justice, among other things proposed that the competent, the able, and the superlative, be hamstrung and penalized so that the incompetent, the disabled, and the mediocre would have an equal chance at "success." Or at least the latter would be awarded the appropriate handicap points to accomplish the same thing. This was deemed a just system to achieve an equalization of results that would "humanize" competition and preempt the envy, hurt feelings and frustration of the incompetent, the disabled, and the mediocre. It is the same "humanitarian" philosophy responsible for such things as soccer games without scores, overseen by liberal soccer moms concerned about the self-esteem of their kids and at the same time resentful of the boisterous pride of the kids on the other team.

Contrary to the age-old notion and ethics of sportsmanship, the Rawlsian concept of "fair" is not playing by the rules and winning by the rules. "Fair" is the tilting of rules in favor of those unable to comprehend the rules or unable to win by them.

The Rawls notion of fairness is also partly responsible for the theme here, for stopping Israel from achieving a victory over Hamas and any of her past assailants and permanently extinguishing her mortal enemies, thereby achieving some kind of peace that Hamas would never break because it would no longer exist. That those mortal enemies are killers who wish to do to Israel what was nearly done to Lara Logan in Tahir Square - violation in every manner and complete dismemberment and an agonizing death - is of no import to the humanitarians who sweat like hogs to broker a deal between Israel and her enemies.

For the sake of peace, harmony, and international amity, what's one beautiful woman's life compared with the existence of hundreds of thousands of burqa-encased women doing their duty to not be beautiful and so not triggering the duty of Muslim men to assault them? What's the freedom of a single nation compared with the wishes of hundreds of thousands of manqués who do not yearn to be free but rather wish to be led, dominated and exploited as all of Allah's wingless chillun?

Hamas and Hezbollah and Fatah are merely "freedom fighters" in Halloween costumes, ski masks, and a weakness for Mein Kampf, and we mustn't judge them because of their questionable habits and psychopathic penchant for totalitarianism. Their feelings are hurt and pent up because the world will not grant them their handicapped justice, never mind that their concept of the kind of "justice" they intend for the Israelis is of the Zulu kind when the latter disemboweled colonial Dutch women and men settlers they happened to have overwhelmed and killed and paraded their children and infants on the tips of their assegais. Perhaps, when they returned to their kraals, they also passed out candy in celebration of their victory.

Lest someone suggest that is a "racist" comparison, I could also cite Vlad the Impaler and what he did to invading Turks, or the Turks and Kurds who savaged the Armenians, or the Apaches and the Iroquois whose methods of torturing and killing whites and other Indians rivaled in cruelty those of the Nazis. And, of course, Islam's sacred documents describe and report numerous methods of killing and torturing Jews, infidels, apostates, and others who do not submit to all of Allah's and Mohammad's dictats.

Daniel Greenfield, in his Sultan Knish column, "War is the Answer," about the alleged "cease-fire" coerced on Israel by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, mentioned the ethereal character of Immanuel Kant's plan for "perpetual peace." Kant is one of Rawls's intellectual ancestors. It should be pointed out, however, that our humanitarian diplomats are also motivated by one of the Prussian philosopher's categorical imperatives, to do that which one "feels" is right and to act to make it an ineluctable maxim, to "will" it as a moral law and duty, regardless of the cost to oneself or to others, even if it means engaging in a bit of nihilistic destruction.

Kant's notion of "peace" is also responsible for the "peace" promulgated by yesteryear's hippies and peaceniks, a "peace" without morality or conditions, "peace" for the sake of "peace," regardless of the cost to those who would lose their lives from its enforcement. And yesteryear's hippies became Rhodes scholars and attained permanent places in political leadership, academic, diplomatic, military, and policymaking circles. Need I mention names?

Hillary Clinton's notion of a "durable peace" is as ethereal and other-worldly as Kant's. And she and Obama know it.

Kant's 1795 idea of a kind of League of Nations that would somehow enforce peace would also depend on the "will" of its members, the "will" amounting to little more than squeezing their eyes shut and, sweating buckets, wishing very hard that governments and dictators and the authors of genocide just stop doing those atrocious things because they're very embarrassing and give the wishers after peace pangs of conscience and remorse. They'd rather not be bothered.

Thus, the "ceasefire" that is merely a hudna, or temporary truce, will benefit Hamas and allow it to catch its breath and rearm and prepare for the next round of massacring Israelis and perhaps even carry the butchery to the U.S. It's only "fair," you see: Hamas is so outgunned by Israel that it needs time to renew its stockpile of rockets and replenish the rocketeers who perished in Israel's retaliatory bombings, in order to continue its campaign against the giant.

Iran has boasted that it has supplied Hamas with its rocketry with which to pummel Israel into terror and submission. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who "brokered" the cease-fire with much help from Obama, has now assumed dictatorial powers, insulating himself from all legal and political opposition. Morsi, a power in the global caliphate-seeking Muslim Brotherhood, is a child of the late Arab Spring, and the Arab Spring was a child of Barack Obama.

Some pundits will claim that now Obama has a real problem on his hands, in the way of finding a way to contain the ambitions and treachery of Morsi. They will say that it will require the highest art of statecraft and diplomacy. But that is wishful thinking. It is imagining that the conflict is no more serious than a difference of opinion in the fantasy world of Friends. Or in Elaine Benes's head. Neither Obama nor Clinton views the situation as a "problem." They seem to be rather content with how things stand. After all, they made Israel cry "uncle."

To them, war is simply no good at all. The wrong combatant might just win if left alone to win. And that would not be "fair."

Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and suspense novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all available on Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.

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